South Asians and other Asian Americans faced obstacles while exercising their right to vote during the 2004 presidential elections, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) said in a report.
The AALDEF, which deployed over 1,200 volunteers to monitor 200 poll sites in 23 cities across eight states during the November 2004 elections, said in its report that Asian-American voters could not properly exercise their voting rights due to lack of language assistance, rude and hostile behavior of poll workers and racist remarks.
“In the 2004 elections, Asian Americans faced an array of barriers that prevented them from exercising their right to vote,” Margaret Fung, executive director of AALDEF, a nonprofit body working in the area of legal advocacy and community education, told India Abroad.
In several instances, voters’ names were missing from roll books, often due to faulty processing or mishandling of voter registration forms, and many voters were turned away for no fault of theirs, the report states.
The detailed report, “Asian American Access to Democracy in the 2004 Elections,” released this month in New York, further notes that although the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires that voters whose names were missing from the rolls be offered provisional ballots, polls workers denied them this right. Even when provisional ballots were cast, many were not counted.
Following the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida, former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter co-chaired the national Commission on Federal Election Reform.
The commission’s report laid the basis for HAVA, which Congress enacted in December 2002. HAVA provides voters with new rights, mandates a series of changes in how states conduct elections and provides federal funds to update voting systems and expand access to the vote. It also provides federal money to help states improve election administration.
The report also claims that poll workers, in many cases, made improper and excessive demands for identification, misapplying HAVA’s ID requirements. Such demands, the report says, were often only made towards Asian-American voters, in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Further, inadequate notice of the location of poll sites and misdirection to voting booths inside sites created much confusion, preventing many voters from the community from exercising their franchise.
“Although local election officials have worked hard to comply with federal laws and provide assistance to voters, we found that limited English-proficient Asians Americans had much difficulty in voting,” the report says. “Language assistance, such as interpreters or translated voting materials, if any, was far from adequate. Some poll workers were completely unaware of their responsibilities under the Voting Rights Act, or outright refused to make language assistance available to voters.”
Among the many instances of lack of language assistance, the report notes that in Edison, New Jersey, the hub of the Indian community, Indian Americans wanting to vote lacked interpreters.
“Gujarati-speaking voters in Edison also reported the need for interpreters in their language,” says the report, which was based on a survey that received over 600 complaints of what AALDEF called the voting barriers.
The report called on the U.S. Congress to re-authorize and expand Language Assistance Provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and enforce provisions of certain sections of the law that are set to expire in 2007.
It called on the Department of Justice to continue its enforcement of the particular section of Voting Rights Act for Asian language assistance and increase enforcement to ensure that voters can be assisted by a person of their choice.
It also recommended that poll workers who are rude, hostile or racially discriminatory towards Asian and limited-English-proficient voters and who deny language assistance should be reprimanded or removed from their posts.
“The need for renewal of the Voting Rights Act is undeniable,” said AALDEF staff attorney Glenn Magpantay, the principal author of the report. “The Act’s provisions for language assistance (Section 203) and enforcement (Section 5) will expire in 2007, unless Congress re-authorizes them. AALDEF is pressing for re-authorization of both sections and an expansion of Section 203 to include jurisdictions not currently covered for Asian language assistance in states like New Jersey, Massachusetts and Virginia.”
